A more efficient way to learn those orchestral violin excerpts

February 1, 2013 at 4:24 PM

Hi Violinists,

I wanted to let you know about a little project I have been working on about how to study violin excerpts.

When I finished music school, I felt pretty good about how I played my scales, sonatas, and concerti. But, when I started taking auditions to join an orchestra, and actually make a living, I realized I knew basically nothing about excerpts.

One of the most common suggestions I was told was to listen to the excerpt, and listen to a a couple different interpretations as well. This was often a tedious and time consuming process-both in finding the sheet music, and the recordings

I would have to count out measure numbers and bracket them off, and then try to sift through the recordings to find those 10 measures on the recording. It would take me a couple of minutes to find a 20 second excerpt.

I realized I was wasting so much time, so I created the free resource, ViolinExcerpts.com as a way to save some time.

So, here you can find an image of the most popular excerpts, and a couple different recordings of just the excerpt. On some of them, I've even added metronome markings to see how their tempi compare.

In other sections I've added videos of masterclasses from YouTube, as well as a platform for people to upload videos of themselves playing excerpts to get feedback-a mock audition kind of experience.

I'm always adding more excerpts and features, and trying to find features that make me a better player. If you have some suggestions of ways to improve the site, I'd love to hear from you. I have found that this saves me lots of time, and allows me to get back to actually practicing much quicker. I hope it can help you as well.